Social Understanding from a Spiritual-Scientific Perspective

GA 191 — 19 October 1919, Dornach

Ninth Lecture

In these reflections, I have spoken to you from a variety of perspectives about the fact that there is a connection between the assimilation of spiritual-scientific knowledge and social understanding, which should spread more and more among humanity. You have probably felt the need to raise the question more thoroughly: What is the inner relationship between the relationships between people, which we call social, and what can develop as feeling in us as we gradually become familiar with spiritual scientific ideas? The spiritual-scientific concepts show us, first of all, a certain inner soul mood by making us understand that which one experiences in ordinary life but must actually feel as the most incomprehensible: human destiny. This human destiny becomes understandable from a certain point of view by getting to know the law of repeated earthly lives and their interrelations, the law of karma. We learn how an earthly life that we enter and complete is dependent on our previous earthly lives. We have already spoken of the forces that play over from one earthly life into another, and from this we have seen how, so to speak, the cosmic technique of shaping fate is.

Now everyone feels that today, unless he attains higher knowledge, man can only dimly sense how his fate is shaped by the laws of successive earthly lives. What we call karma is something that, in theory, can be relatively easily understood today. You can see this from the last edition of my Theosophy, in which the chapter on karma has been reworked. But the real vision of life that I spoke of yesterday, that simple vision of life, unclouded by prejudice and preconception, which would immediately reveal the law of fate, is still possessed by very few people today. If people would really see what is going on in life as I spoke of yesterday, in terms of simple, unprejudiced seeing, then common sense would speak of the law of destiny in the sense of spiritual science. But that is not yet the case for most people today. Above all, because of their lack of simple seeing, most people do not see clearly how the consciousness of the I lives in the soul. Even today there are philosophers who speak of the sense of self as if this sense of self were the most certain, the most real. This can be said to be just as true on the one hand as it is one-sided, even almost incorrect, on the other. For how do we actually perceive our human self?

Yesterday, you learned with regard to our inner life how our mental life is actually only a reflection of our prenatal life, how our life of will is the embryonic, germinal aspect of our post-mortem life, and how, therefore, what takes place in our soul plays out is fundamentally not at all attached to what envelops us as a body from birth to death, and how our being, which is outside of the body and even outside of time, plays into our thinking on the one hand and into our will on the other. But they also know how we look back on our lives and have the feeling that we have the completed course of life behind us as memory. As human beings, it is very easy for us to imagine that we have consciously traversed our life and stored it in our memory from the point in time to which we can remember going back. It seems to a person that if the moment of the present is here (see drawing), he remembers back to the moment in childhood to which he can remember. You can easily see that this is a huge mistake. If you retrace your life back to the moment you remember in your childhood, and view this as a closed current, then of course it is totally wrong, because in reality, when you look back in this way, you first perceive only the 'events of the last day on which you look back; then there is the night in between, then the previous day, then the night in which you perceive nothing, then the day before that and so on.

So it is a tremendous illusion if you simply overlook the fact that this recall, this conscious recall, does not give you a closed flow, but in reality gives you a continuously interrupted flow, in that all the times you were asleep are left out of this recall. So you don't have a continuous line of recall, but a discontinuous line of recall, a continuously interrupted line of recall.

Now, in order to make the meaning of what I am actually trying to say here clear to you, I would like to convey an image to you. Imagine you have the following image: a white disc and a dark spot within this disc. You can now ask: What am I perceiving here? – The white disc. Where there is no white, you see the black spot. I don't want to discuss whether the black spot is real or just the absence of white. But you see this black spot. You see that this black spot is where there is no white, inside the white disc. Take this image and apply it to the way you actually perceive your self in ordinary life. Just as you do not perceive anything here (in the middle) where the black spot is, so you do not really perceive your ego. You do not perceive your ego at all, but you do perceive your experiences that you have gone through during your various day-wakings. And you do not perceive your ego at all; only by the fact that somewhere, when you survey your experiences, your experiences are not there, just as there is no white here in the black spot, you perceive your ego. When you look back over your life, you perceive the experiences, and you do not perceive these interruptions. Instead, you perceive your ego. It is the absence of the experiences of the day that gives you the real perception of your ego, that is, when you say “I,” you perceive the time in your life that you have slept through.

In fact, the blank space in your life when you look back is what gives rise to your sense of self. Suppose you didn't sleep at all, you would always be awake, then you would have no sense of self when you look back. You would feel like a being that floats, without a sense of self, in the events of the world's existence.

It is extremely important to simply see these things. Because every person believes that the perception of the self is an experience. No, the perception of the self is the respective hole in the experiences. I ask you to hold on to that for the time being.

And now I ask you to remember how I told you over and over again that a person not only sleeps when he sleeps, but that a person also sleeps when he is awake. A person is actually only awake with regard to his world of sense and imagination. A person is only really awake in his sense perceptions and in his imagination. In relation to his volition, he sleeps. Just as little as man looks into what he accomplishes from falling asleep to waking up, he looks into the inner impulses of his volition. Yesterday I spoke about how the “guy” or the “gal” look at each other in their actions, but do not see the volition. With regard to the will, man sleeps. He also sleeps during the day by being a willing person. He only wakes up by being a sensually perceiving and intellectually conceptualizing person. He is only half awake; for the other, for the willing part of his being, man also sleeps while watching.

And now you will understand how it actually is with the I. It does not enter at all as a real being into your sensory perceptions and into your ideas, but remains down in the will and continues to sleep there even from waking to falling asleep. Therefore, you can never see it as a real being, but only as the hollow circle in the middle. You can have the dark feeling that you have an ego in that something of what you have like a hole in your soul experiences sounds out of your will. But the perception of the ego is a thoroughly negative one. It is extremely important to realize this. It is necessary that the superficial idea of the ego, which also appears in many philosophies of modern times, be recognized in its vanity. For only when one has seen through all the facts that I have set out here, will one understand, inwardly understand, the relationship between people in life.

I have described this relationship between people in life in the new edition of my “Philosophy of Freedom” in one of the extensions that I have added to the book in the new edition. We not only perceive our own ego, as I have just discussed, albeit negatively, but we also perceive the ego of the other person. We could not perceive it if the ego were in our own consciousness. If the ego were in our own consciousness, then the relationship between people would be quite fatal; then we would go through the world and only have I, I, I in our consciousness within our world of sense and imagination. We would pass by other people and perceive them only as shadows, and we would be surprised when we reach out our hand that these shadows stop our hand. We would not be able to explain to ourselves where this comes from, that we cannot reach through a person. All this would lead to the fact that we would have the ego substantially, not merely as the idea of a negative in our ideas and in our sense life. We do not have it in our thinking and sense life. There the I is actually in it, but not in the thinking and not in the sense life directly.

When we perceive another person, we actually perceive them through our will. It is not uncommon today, among people who think of themselves as philosophers, to hear the following crazy notion: when we stand in front of a person, we find a form: there is hair on top, then a forehead, then a nose, a mouth, and so on. We have often seen ourselves in the mirror; we look just like the person standing in front of us. And since we have an ego, we conclude by analogy that the other person also has an ego. – This is a crazy idea, a real, proper nonsense! For we actually perceive the other person's ego just as we perceive our own, albeit as a negative. And precisely because our ego is not in our consciousness, but outside of our consciousness, like the will, that is why we can put ourselves in the other person's shoes. If the ego were in our consciousness, we would not be able to put ourselves in the other person's shoes and would only perceive them as if in a shadowy existence. And how does this perception of the other person take place? Something like a very complicated process takes place when we perceive the other person. We are facing him: he, so to speak, takes up our attention and puts us to sleep for a very brief moment. He hypnotizes us, he puts us to sleep for a moment. Our sense of humanity is actually put to sleep for a very brief moment. We resist this and assert our personality. This is now like the pendulum swing: sleeping in the other, waking up in ourselves, and again sleeping in the other, waking up in ourselves. And this complicated process of swinging back and forth between falling asleep in the other and waking up in ourselves takes place in us when we face the other. It is a process in our will. We just do not perceive it because we do not perceive our will at all. But this continuous oscillation back and forth takes place as described in my “Philosophy of Freedom”.

You see, in this vibration between falling asleep in the other and waking up in ourselves, you have the primal element, so to speak, the atom of human beings living together socially. This is the original element of what social life is from person to person. This original element and with it all the complicated structures of social life actually rest in that part of our being that sleeps, even when we are awake. Social life is essentially at most a dreaming being of the waking person; it is not a fully awake life that the person lives in social life. This is why the social element is so difficult to grasp in our ordinary lives, because it is not really a fully waking life at all, because it is a dreamy life, and because we actually always have to defend ourselves against the social feeling, against the feeling in the other, in order to maintain ourselves in ourselves.

Now think about how complicated it makes our lives that we enter into such relationships with different people, relationships that consist of a constant falling asleep and waking up. One person is like that, the other person is like that. We fall asleep into them. This falling asleep is how the other person is. We merge with them as we fall asleep. Just remember the following: Imagine that you have now spoken to so and so many people, for my sake, during the interval or somehow else in the hall. You have fallen asleep in all of them, and that is always there in you after you wake up from them. In this way you take something of the essence of these people across with you. All this vibrates from person to person, this waves from person to person. Basically, it is a dim, dark element that prevails in this social coexistence of human beings. And the present consciousness of the human being does not have much of this social feeling, which waves and weaves from person to person in a dark, dim way.

In our time, it is now our task as people of the present – as you can see from the various reflections we have made – to gradually rise from the old blood relationships to an understanding of what is so dimly and darkly weaving and undulating among us socially. One of the most important tasks of the present time is to acquire an understanding of this weaving and rippling. What I call the “threefold social organism” is basically just a structure of human coexistence that allows people, little by little, after a number of generations, to really absorb this weaving and essence from person to person, which can be described as the social element. This understanding can only come about through the independent coexistence of economic life, legal life and spiritual life, and in particular through the spiritual life being completely free from the other two areas of life.

It is the most important public task of present and future humanity to carry out this threefold order so that humanity can continue to exist at all and so that it can come to a truly social inner understanding of human life. In modern times, since the middle of the 15th century, humanity has begun the process of developing this understanding. It is difficult at present only for the reason that for the first time in the whole evolution of humanity on earth, the divine spiritual powers of the world are appealing to the consciousness of human beings. All progress achieved so far has been brought about more or less unconsciously. The first thing to be done is to consciously strive for a social structure. Old social structures have emerged from blood ties, from the small and large family, from the clan, the classes and so on. They have then expanded into folk connections. Today, humanity is floundering in the belief that it can adhere to such connections in a dishonest way, in the context of nations, while basically it has long since overcome what national connections are, and the need has long since arisen to arrive at social connections other than those represented by the blood relationship between nations.

I have told you that, to a certain extent, the first step on this path to an understanding of the kind that is necessary for the present and the near future was the development, with the Reformation, of the dominance of the economic man. I have pointed out to you how in ancient times the initiate, the initiate, ruled, how then the priest ruled, and how then since the middle of the 15th century the economic man has become the ruler. Since the Reformation, those who otherwise wore purple robes and presented themselves as rulers had to become the puppets of the economic people if they wanted to rule. In truth, more and more economic people have ruled since the middle of the 15th century, those people who took care of the economy of the various territories of the earth. If in name others ruled, it was only in name, and the governments were basically permeated by economic principles. Of course, no one likes to admit that everything that has been done since the Reformation has been done from an economic point of view. People talk about ideals and so on. But for the representative of real history, these are only masks. In order not to lift the veil too much, since the Reformation there have also been ministers of education, justice, and so on. But all of them were actually only somewhat less nuanced economic ministers. Those who look at the realities can see that at most they transferred old traditions, but essentially they did so under economic considerations.

In this respect, the Catholic Church actually understood how to be quite contemporary, especially in the age of the Reformation. In the onset of the Reformation era, the Catholic Church basically understood best how to make progress in line with the newer economic principle. One only needs to pick out one “fact from the other facts. Up to that time the church had managed to draw close together the highest spiritual matters and the most trivial worldly matters. In the old days, sins could be atoned for by all manner of deeds. Gradually it came about that sins could be atoned for by paying. And the Pope, faster than the other worldly powers, understood very well how to take advantage of the progress of the modern age. He anticipated his income from the atoning of sins in later times. When one has the power to be paid for forgiving the sins committed by people, it means a very substantial future income. And when this is as secure as it can be through the faith of men, then it means a very secure income. The largest bank in Siena therefore considered it a safe business to buy so and so much of the future atonement of humanity from the Pope. The Pope received huge sums of money from a Siena bank, while he was already using these funds well. And the banking house sent Tetzel to collect these sums. He then traveled around the countries of Central Europe and collected the sums again for the Sienese banking house.

You see, the church was extraordinarily good at dealing with the circumstances of modern times. That is also history! This history must certainly be considered.

The economic man came up. The church was there. But after all, the administration of spiritual affairs with the help of the Siena banking house and its collector, its agent, is only a mask for the actual spiritual. And if you study modern history, you will find that there is a deep meaning when it is said that the economic man became the dominant one. The Pope has remained such a strong ruler only because he understood at the right moment to become an economic person as well, to adapt to the economic type.

Yes, the economic type has prevailed since the Reformation. It replaced the old priestly type. In the 19th century, humanity in general was only as far advanced as the church, which understood progress much better, had already been at the time of the Reformation. But the economic type of person only prevailed until the 19th century. In the 19th century, another type became dominant. When we say that this type became dominant, it means that the decisive influences in the social structure depend on this type. In the 19th century, in the first and second decades of the 19th century, the usurer, that is to say the banker, then became decisive. If you were to look for an appropriate definition of the banker, then history becomes extremely precarious. If you set up a definition of the banker, the big and the small, from a truly social-economic basis - one avoids that very gladly - then you should not at the same time look for a definition of the usurer. For these two definitions will resemble each other; they can only resemble each other. But this is something that modern humanity has guarded just as carefully as certain secret societies have guarded their “signs” and “words”. It has not been spread among humanity at large. It has remained a secret in social life.

The banker became the ruler. And if you examine how the social structure developed during the 19th century, you find that by the first or second decade of the 19th century, the banker, this particular economic type who only economizes with money, is the man who, just as the economic man did in the past, now exercises his decisive influence on a large scale over everything that turns out to be a social structure, over all the laws of the countries, and so on. It is very important to understand these conditions, it is very important to understand that the economic type of person has been becoming dominant since the Reformation, that the banker has been becoming dominant since the beginning of the 19th century. And one cannot understand the public affairs of the civilized world in the most recent times if one does not see in them a history of the domination of the banking system. Towards the end of the 19th century, what I had already mentioned in 1908 in my Nuremberg lecture cycle then occurred: In the first half of the 19th century and still somewhat into the second half, the individual bearer of the money was the ruler; but then this principle of rule was transformed in such a way that the money itself became the ruler. In the first half of the 19th century, however, the individual human being as a banker was still the ruler. I illustrated this with an example, if you remember. I told you how the Parisian Rothschild was once supposed to be “pumped” by the King of France. If the Parisian Rothschild was supposed to be pumped by the King of France, that already reveals a bit who is actually the ruler. Well, kings don't pump directly, do they. While the king sent his minister – they call this kind of economics minister “minister of finance” – Rothschild happened to be dealing with a leather merchant. The servant told the minister sent by the King of France to wait in the anteroom. Of course, this seemed highly unusual to the minister of the King of France, that he should wait while Rothschild was dealing with a leather merchant. “He shall wait?” He does not wait, but throws open the door: ‘I come to you on behalf of the King of France.’ ‘Please, take a chair,’ said Rothschild. This was, of course, completely incomprehensible to the minister. ‘Yes, but I am the emissary of the King of France!’ ‘Take two chairs and sit down!’

You see, the individual banker was no longer the ruling force. This gradually changed into the rule of shares, of banknotes as such. And we have gradually sailed into the time when the individual money owner is no longer the essential thing, but the abstract, accumulated capital. A person can be rich today and poor tomorrow. The human being himself rolls up and rolls down. The joint-stock company, the abstract one - I explained this in Nuremberg in 1908 - is what has become dominant.

But this means that human development has reached an extreme, an extreme. For as soon as money reigns as such, as soon as money is the actual driving force, the time has come when it must be replaced, I might say, by mere cash figures in money through realities. Now money is the most spiritual part of the economy. It is that part of the economy that can only be grasped spiritually. It has only a spiritual value, money, only a value in human recognition. You can eat bread and meat, but you cannot eat money. You can really acquire something useful for people with money, if the money is recognized. It has only a soul, a spiritual value, a conceptual value, a value of imagination. The time has come when the development of the purely economic spirituality of money must change into something that is truly grasped in the spirit. And what is to be demanded through the threefold order as social understanding is that which must follow directly on from the domination of the most abstract economic factor, namely money. For as dark and dim as social understanding, as I have described it, lives among people, so must it actually become. For just imagine that (see drawing) would be a human life in the present from birth to death. This life would be lived in such a way that the human being acquires social understanding within himself, that the social life, the social structure, would not be built on the monetary value that he has, but on social understanding. Then the human being would go through the gate of death, live through the time until the next birth and then again live through his life from birth to death. What a person acquires here between birth and death in the way of social understanding also lies within him. Above all, it goes into the sleeping will, of which I spoke yesterday; this is carried through the gate of death. So that the person carries his social understanding through the gate of death until world midnight and then carries it again through birth into the next life on earth.

What then becomes of this understanding, acquired through social understanding, in the next life on earth? That is the big question that must be raised today. It becomes understanding of karma. This means that we have now reached the epoch in the world-historical process of human development in which humanity must acquire social understanding; for this social understanding provides an understanding of karma for the next incarnation. But no human being can acquire social understanding other than by acquiring understanding for the spiritual.

You see how things are connected. You see how social understanding depends on spiritual understanding, on a spiritual view of the world and a spiritual philosophy of life. And you see how this in turn determines what, as a conscious recognizing their destiny in the course of human evolution, for those who then, with social understanding, will pass through the gate of death, be reborn and after rebirth understand their destiny.

What is important is to realize how things are connected in the development of humanity on earth. We live in the epoch of the necessity for social understanding. We will be reborn in the epoch of understanding the destiny of the individual human being. It is truly not out of a mere abstract impulse that we speak today of the necessity of social understanding, but it is connected with the innermost developmental impulses of humanity on earth in general.

This is what I wanted to suggest to you today, my dear friends. We will talk about these things further next time.

The lectures in Zurich – you know that tomorrow is the public lecture in Basel – have to be postponed by two days because a hall other than the one initially considered had to be chosen, so that the first lecture will take place on October 24, then there will be lectures on October 25, 26, 28, 29, and 30, and on October 31 there will be a eurythmy performance in Zurich. This means that it is of course not possible for me to give a lecture here next Saturday and Sunday, and I will therefore continue on Thursday for those friends who are willing and able to come here at half past seven next Thursday.